Whether you were just a kid who loved movies or, like me, a film school graduate stuck in a part of the country where few people, if any, could discuss the medium the way you needed to, Ebert and Gene Siskel’s appearance on PBS’ “Sneak Previews” in the late 1970s was a weekly half hour of soul saving.

The news of Ebert’s death at 70 Thursday after a long, inspiring battle with cancer triggered thousands of appreciations from people he taught to love movies, generations of film critics he mentored, and Hollywood figures he both praised and disparaged. However they personally interpret it, I think everybody can agree that the fundamental thing Ebert and Siskel did was to show everybody that thinking about movies was the best way to watch them, and that has had an incalculably positive effect on American culture.

President Barack Obama tweeted “The movies won’t be the same without Roger.” ‘Nuff said, in a way, but there is more.

Not only on television, but in his decades of writing for the Chicago Sun-Times and many books, and his pioneering work on the Internet and in social media, Ebert brought passion, style and tenacious scholarship to a field that has no shortage of any of those qualities - Roger’s great trick, though, was that he somehow made it all accessible. The casual filmgoer may not have known every reference an Ebert review made to Yasujiro Ozu or German Expressionism, but Ebert never made them feel dumb about it.

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Nobody has ever done more to popularize film criticism. With Siskel, he consistently showed the world it was a legitimate pursuit (and, in the days before the Web anyway, a worthwhile profession). Without Siskel, his prodigious output demonstrated what a joyous calling consuming movie love could be. How he found time to meet and marry his delightful wife, Chaz, was a bit of a mystery to many of us; there was always so much to see, and he wrote about everything he saw.

I can’t say I’ve read a lot of his work. Well before I’d heard of Ebert, I’d been schooled in Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, Andre Bazin and James Agee - critics’ critics, if you will, at least to this critic’s mind. The folks who awarded Ebert the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for film criticism obviously did not share my peculiar preferences.

Anyway, except for his example that you could make a lot of money at this game, Ebert wasn’t the reason I became a film critic. However, I may never have had my career without him.

I’d been living in L.A. a few years when I sold my first movie story to a newspaper: the Chicago Sun-Times, as it turned out. They liked it enough to offer me more work, providing I could get the interviews with the stars they wanted. That was rarely a problem when publicists heard that I wanted to talk to Jack Nicholson or Arnold Schwarzenegger or You Name ‘Em for Roger Ebert’s Paper. Really, really not trying to humblebrag here, but my byline popping up on the same page as Ebert’s was an unimaginable professional godsend - and, personally, thrilling.

None of that was Ebert’s conscious doing, of course; I just got some of the interviews he was too busy with other stuff to write. It didn’t make my life but it made it a lot easier, and here is where the words “forever grateful” should probably be placed.

We didn’t know each other very well; we exchanged pleasantries when we’d cross paths at junkets or film festivals; and if we did extend a conversation it was usually about our great Sun-Times editors, Laura Emerick and the late Lon Grahnke, not movies. That was probably my cowardly fault; as much as I enjoyed watching him tear up Siskel, I didn’t want him to do it to me.

Now, of course, I wish I’d risked it. When he soldiered on silently after cancer surgery complications took his speech, we all realized how much we missed his rapier verbal skills, even as we were astonished and uplifted by his furious recommitment to the written word at a time we feared technology was rendering it obsolete.

Such a brilliant mind there, so inquisitive and open to new experiences - and able to master new paths of communication - until the very end. I mean, what kind of brain could even conceive of two geeky guys talking and arguing about movies becoming must-see TV, let alone making it work and, in the process, reviving “thumbs up, thumbs down” as a cultural meme for the first time since the Roman Empire?

Yes, many critics, myself included to some extent, view Roger and Gene’s trademark digits as antithetical to serious analysis; reductive is the preferred term we like to use. It would be dishonest, though, to deny that the thumb thing did more to make film criticism a viable, popular endeavor than Sarris’ trenchant insights and Kael’s transcendent prose ever managed.

Some will disagree with that. Good, let the argument go on. But while you’re fighting, keep in mind that you’re paying tribute to Roger Ebert in a way that he would have loved